Introducing: The Glass Eye

One eye on mainstream media misandry and abuse of data privilege.

A central purpose of this blog is to highlight some of the more blatant examples of what I call unethical gender journalism.

This essentially relates to articles or opinion pieces carried by the mainstream media that, at first glance, might reasonably be considered to promote or support concepts of ‘gender equality’ but on closer inspection, appear to spectacularly fail for reasons including obvious narrative flaws, information bias or just plain old fashioned sexism.

Following on from my initial mini examination of the ugly side of gender journalism, I’ve decided to create the ‘Glass Eye’ tag on this blog to document and comment on further examples.

I’m conscious that anyone stumbling onto these pages for the first time might initially consider dismissing me as (at worst) a plain old fashioned misogynist or (at best) a male rights activist (not that there’s anything remotely wrong with being an MRA).

The main reason they might make this mistake is because, to date, pretty much all of the articles I have featured focus on female perspectives of gender inequalities and have, almost exclusively, been written by women.

If this thought has crossed your mind, allow me to say two things before you judge me too harshly.

Firstly, I have worked to challenge inequalities and promote concepts of equality for over twenty years now and the reason I decided to start this blog was to draw attention to an extremely obvious type of inequality that seems to largely go unnoticed or unchallenged.

Secondly, the reason I mostly feature articles by female writers is because they are vastly over-represented in the ‘gender journalism industry’ generally, and, in my humble subjective opinion, in the arena of unethical gender journalism especially.

The honest truth is that, to date, I have struggled to find an article purporting to promote gender equality for (or from the perspective of) men which, upon closer inspection, appears to spectacularly fail based on my aforementioned criteria. Anyone reading this who does btw, please feel free to draw it to my attention and I will happily commit to commenting on it.

In truth (regardless of quality) I struggle to find mainstream media articles purporting to promote gender equality for men at all, despite the fact that today’s TYPICAL MAN doesn’t have it all his own way.

Despite being repeatedly told that it’s a man’s, man’s world, boys today are born into a world where they are much more likely to be put into care and much less likely to be adopted; they are four times more likely to be excluded from school and significantly more likely to leave school without qualifications; they are less likely to go to college or even enter an apprenticeship and are much more likely to experience glass cellar employment, workplace fatality, redundancy, long term unemployment, violent crime, homelessness, imprisonment and involuntary separation from their children

Perhaps this is because men are a rubbish sex generally but perhaps, just perhaps, humanity, collectively, is failing some of the men in our ranks. Men who collectively and relatively quietly pay significantly more into the public purse than women.

Perhaps the very fact that they are told at a young age that they are made from frogs, snails and puppy dog tails and do horrible, selfish things like subjugating women, in some small way impacts on the self-esteem of the weaker ones, the ones who can’t just man up and get on with things. Perhaps in some small way this might even contribute to the silent suicide epidemic impacting predominately on men.

I think that any mainstream media journalist or editor reading their comments section on a remotely regular basis will have a general understanding that it can reasonably be argued that men experience a few ‘inequalities’ of their own. I think they also have a general understanding that it doesn’t generally pay to address this under the ‘gender equality’ banner especially when ‘click bait’ like this is so very good for business.

I’m not necessarily convinced that the average man on the street is likely to be especially offended by the average article featured in this blog. In the main men generally aren’t the target audience and women are much more likely to actually read them.

The reason I think it’s important to call out the more obvious extremities is because unchecked fallacies presented in soft echo chamber environments can be interpreted as hard fact further down the line. Hard facts which inform male and female policy makers genuinely committed to addressing inequalities for the best interest of everyone with a stake in society.

Another reason is that people paid to promote, ponder or prevaricate on the preferred position of women rights activists may put food on their own families’ table under the guise of championing ‘gender equality’ but not all of them take a balanced approach. As my first example highlights, some would appear to prefer to cross the road, staring firmly at their own navel, to avoid ‘leaning in’ and helping out a brother in obvious need. The sad truth is that male rights and their activists are so often ridiculed and more often ignored by gender equality experts or champions because the concept of men’s rights is challenging, unappealing and appears (to them) very bad for business.

In this little collection I’ll take a look at the Independent’s different perspectives on the merit of International Gender days; a bird with a tale to tell about the recession; dina rickman’s thoughts on the glass ceiling via life in general and Laura Bate’s concerns about sexsisim in education.

Share this:

Like this:

Related

About the author

EYEisBloke is an equality champion who blogs about a phenomenon called 'the Glass Blind Spot' - which is where someone consciously or unconsciously ignores information relevant to a discussion about equality and social justice because it would undermine or distract from their preferred narrative.